Many telecommunications devices include backplanes for transmitting digital information between components of the devices. For example, a telecommunications switching system might include a backplane for transmitting digital data representing voice signals between cards associated with incoming and outgoing ports. Typically, such a system would also include a mechanism to allow these cards to communicate with one another and to receive command, control, and administrative information from other components during operation of the system. Successful operation of the system in many instances depends heavily upon the ability of this communications mechanism to meet the often stringent availability, bandwidth, flexibility, and other requirements placed on the system.
As the telecommunications industry continues to dominate the growth of the global economy, meeting availability, bandwidth, flexibility, and other requirements within telecommunications systems has become increasingly important. However, standard and other previous communications techniques are inadequate to meet the requirements placed on many systems. For example and not by way of limitation, techniques such as Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI), 10Base2, 10BaseT, and 100BaseT Ethernet, IEEE 1394 (“Firewire”), Universal Serial Bus (USB), and High level Data Link Control (HDLC) each lack one or more attributes that are often important within a backplane environment. Among other deficiencies, none of these techniques provides a suitable combination of the following: (1) a non-hierarchical peer-to-peer communication environment; (2) support for point-to-point, multi-cast, and broadcast message transmission; (3) a robust arbitration scheme; (4) high availability; (5) high bandwidth; and (6) support for appropriate higher level messaging protocols. These and other deficiencies make previous techniques inadequate for communications within a backplane environment of a telecommunications device.